The success of any advertising campaign depends on the accurate placement of advertisements within media, and the verification that specific advertising messages were presented in accord with a predefined media plan. Generally, an advertising campaign is targeted for one or more segments of a population, with media planners determining the best media vehicles to reach the target audience. In this manner, the advertiser seeks to find the most efficient media to minimize the cost to deliver a desired audience.
Thus, prior to executing a given advertising campaign, media planners use syndicated research, such as Nielsen ratings, to determine the best media vehicles to reach a target audience. In addition, media planners utilize other information sources to research and compare the costs associated with reaching an audience through each available media vehicle. During a given advertising campaign, it is helpful to measure the target audience's exposure to the advertising messages, since media planners might make corrections in order to optimize the execution of the media plan. Likewise, after a given advertising campaign, media planners often analyze the execution of the campaign to confirm that the advertising messages reached the targeted audience to determine the accuracy of the campaign's messages in reaching the targeted audience.
As audiences have fragmented, due to the increasing number of available channels and online options, it has become increasingly challenging for media planners to determine which media vehicles provide the best avenue to a given audience. The Internet, in particular, provides advertisers with many media options and is becoming ubiquitously available in an expanding variety of personal electronic devices, far beyond its initial limited availability to users via computer terminals and desktop computers. As with other media, advertising has become an important part of Internet revenue models. Much of the Internet's value to the advertising community is due to its enormous and evolving diversity of advertising formats, including the banner ad and Java applets, and its capability to deliver customized and relevant advertising to end users. For a more detailed discussion of advertising media, see D. Jugenheimer et al., Advertising Media Strategy and Tactics (W.C.B. Brown & Benchmark, 1992), incorporated by reference herein.
Thus, the Internet provides an efficient mechanism for matching the advertising message to the appropriate segment of the audience. Such diverse advertising formats, however, present challenges for measuring a population's exposure to and interactions with such advertisements. While the success of the Internet can be attributed, in large part, to its open media standards that permit the creation and delivery of content having diverse formats across many platforms, there is currently no user-centric system capable of adequately measuring the diverse media formats across the growing variety of Internet-enabled consumer platforms, consistent with the needs of the advertising community.
Generally, a given population's exposure to and interactions with media is measured by knowing the television channels and other information sources that the members of the population select. This can be performed either as a census, where the choices of the entire population are collected, or as a sample, where a statistically valid sub-population or panel is chosen to represent the entire population. Nielsen Media Research, for example, uses a panel of households, known as “Nielsen Families,” for measuring television viewing. Such panels enable research companies to correlate demographics, such as age, gender, income and education, with choice of content.
Conventional content frequently contains, or is associated with, metadata that provides information about the content. For example, many broadcasters transmit information with conventional programming to help identify the content, for example, by program and episode. Nielsen, for example, extracts such accompanying information for measurement purposes to track the programs viewed by certain members of a panel. In addition, smart electronic program guides use such accompanying information to help individuals or their agents find content of interest.
Similarly, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has endorsed the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), which is an open standard for tagging information and coding content on the Internet. The PICS standard is designed to allow software to automatically filter content that individuals choose not to receive, such as violent content, according to a ratings system. The PICS standard provides parents and other individuals with the ability to select categories of content that can be automatically blocked, in a similar manner to V-chip technology, for conventional programming. While the PICS standard allows an entire web site or static pages to be rated, the PICS standard does not permit tagging content on an object level.
In addition, traditional electronic advertising, such as television and radio advertisements, have unique identification codes, or Industry Standard Commercial Identification (ISCI) codes, which are used for handling, broadcasting, storing and retrieving commercials. Under the ISCI standard, an ISCI alpha prefix and an ISCI numeric code identify each commercial. An ISCI prefix is assigned by ISCI to national and regional advertisers and advertising agencies. The ISCI code may be used in any manner, at the discretion of the prefix owner, provided the code consists of four letters followed by four numbers. Although ISCI codes are not presently encoded as computer readable data with each advertisement, they might evolve to do so for Internet advertising, to better manage advertising on the Internet.
There exists both “pull” and “push” models for delivering Internet content. On traditional web sites, individuals “pull” content by browsing. These web sites can use tools to analyze the “hits” to their sites in real-time. Additionally, there exist “push” models of content delivery, such as provided by PointCast™. PointCast™ is a webcasting service that “pushes” or streams a variety of information, including editorial and advertising content, to a receiving software component, such as their proprietary screensaver, or Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, version 4.0. Presently, each PointCast™ subscriber self-reports demographic information. Therefore, PointCast™ can provide advertisers with user-centric information about advertising exposure. Self-monitoring, however, is contrary to advertising industry guidelines, which express a preference for measurement by a disinterested third party. In addition, the PointCast™ system is limited to measuring only electronic media distributed by PointCast™.
Even assuming that an independent auditor verified such site-centric measurements, the measurements often do not accurately reflect the activity of individuals. For example, many of the “hits” on a web site are associated with electronic agents that perform functions on the Internet on behalf of individuals. Examples of such electronic agents include web robots, issued by search engines such as those provided by Infoseek Corp. to index the contents of the Internet, and personal agents that automatically retrieve information from the Internet that matches the specified preferences of an individual. Thus, such electronic agents increase the traffic count of the respective web site, as they are not necessarily representative of an individual viewing Internet content. For example, an agent might download the entire contents of a site, while the user only views a single article. Proxy servers, on the other hand, which cache or copy Internet content to a local server or hard disk drive for subsequent access, can decrease the traffic count of a given web site. Proxy servers are used to reduce access time by storing a copy of information that was recently downloaded from a site. Thus, upon a subsequent request, the information can be delivered from the local server rather than the Internet without the knowledge of the web site traffic counter.
While conventional electronic media measurement systems, such as Nielsen Media Research's PeopleMeter™, have successfully measured traditional media, such as television and radio, such systems are not easily extendable to the Internet environment. In addition, the site-centric measurement approaches discussed above have proven unsatisfactory. In order to accurately measure a population's exposure to and interactions with such electronic media, a user-centric measurement approach is needed which is based on a panel chosen to be statistically representative of the total population of interest. Current user-centric Internet measurement systems, however, such as the NPD Group's PC Meter™, are based on interception and interpretation of electronic media presented to members of a panel. Such interception techniques, however, rely on observing calls by software applications to the operating system and require privileged access into operating system internals. Furthermore, PC Meter™ is currently limited to household users of the Windows™ operating system, which may not be statistically representative of the total population of interest. For a more detailed discussion of the PC Meter™ system, see PCT Published Application Number WO 96/41495.
It is believed that observing operating system internals will become increasingly challenging, if not impossible, with the trend towards more secure operating systems and communication security. Windows NT™ from Microsoft™, for example, implements a concentric ring structure of ascending privilege with an outermost ring of lowest privilege and an innermost ring of highest privilege, from which applications are excluded, based on the processor ring architecture specified by Intel Corporation. As security services become more available to Internet applications, both for computer-to-computer communications and application-to-application communications, much of this internal traffic will be encrypted. In addition, such operating system monitoring techniques will be challenging to implement within the many proprietary implementations of Internet-enabled devices, such as WebTV™. Even assuming that such user-centric measurement systems are successful in obtaining access to these communications, it is very challenging to understand what the intercepted messages mean.
A recent industry article indicates that a new company, Relevant Knowledge Inc., of Atlanta, Ga., has developed a real-time approach to compete with the PC Meter™ system. Although Relevant Knowledge Inc. did not comment publicly for the article, it does not appear that Relevant Knowledge Inc. is using a cooperative approach. Rather, it appears that Relevant Knowledge Inc. is monitoring information, using interception and interpretation, and leveraging the communication capabilities of the Internet to distribute their monitoring software to their panel members and to collect data in real-time.
As apparent from the above-described deficiencies with conventional electronic media measurement systems, a need exists for a universal system for measuring electronic media having diverse formats, including television, radio, Internet, and online services, across a plurality of platforms. A further need exists for a cooperating system that extends the open media standards of the Internet to measure a population's exposure to and interactions with such electronic media. Yet another need exists for a system to measure traditional television, radio, cable television, digital satellite programming and advertising delivered to households that use Internet-enabled computers and appliances for viewing, listening and interacting with such content.